AOL Launching 12 New Sites in 2008

Bloomberg.com reports AOL will be launching a dozen sites within the next six months to try and increase its market share in terms of traffic to Google and Yahoo. Declining subscriptions and change of views in the company is leading AOL to become an ad network as we seen in 2007 with the acquisition of Quigo and other networks.

The AOL business model is simple, if they can’t attract subscribers anymore, then build content sites since the traffic is there already and go after advertisers since AOL is a brand name recognized all across the U.S, or the world for that matter.

Wee at Bloomberg.com reports, “An increase in visitors and advertising hasn’t made up for declines at the unit’s Internet dial-up business, leading to a 32 percent drop in AOL’s fourth-quarter revenue.Last year, AOL introduced new sites such as “Asylum,” a men’s lifestyle site, and music site “Spinner” to go after niche interests within broader categories…”

The AOL network had 109.4 million visitors which is just behind the big players, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Growing interest in online marketing by large and small corporations should make this business model by AOL a successful one but we’ll see how the economy could affect advertising budgets across the board.